WordPress announced the release of WordPress 2.9.1. This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts. Download 2.9.1 or upgrade automatically from the Tools->Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area. http://wordpress.org/development/2010/01/wordpress-2-9-1/, http://wordpress.org/download/
Year: 2010 (Page 23 of 23)
By Ted Treanor, Senior Publishing Consultant
Publishing predictions for 2010 abound. As a digital publishing pioneer and visionary, Ted Treanor has been well positioned ahead of the curve, with a unique vantage point to see what’s in store for the industry. At this tipping point, publishing convergence of print and digital has collided with mainstream. Let us know what you think of these predictions.
Let’s see if 13 predictions will be lucky for publishing.
- New eReading devices will proliferate. The market is responding like the California gold rush. Not only will there be new companies launching in 2010, but big electronics firms will have their products. CES will be a haven for digital reading, which will astound everyone.
- Pricing experimentation will take center stage.
- Digital sales channels both retail and distribution will grow rapidly.
- The ePub standard (IDPF.org) will strengthen as an international industry standard. ePub will compete with PDF for the top format for commercial content.
- The big surprise this year will be the number of large recognized companies that will strategically target the digital publishing eReading and content space. At least one major communications infrastructure company (possibly wireless) will stake a claim through a publishing partnership. Other prime segments will be computer manufacturers and printer manufactures.
- Trade associations will scramble to stay relevant in their attempt to lead members through this time of convergence of print and digital.
- Content workflow using XML technologies will become standard for single source production to multiple print and digital editions.
- Publishers will attempt to build direct relationships with their reader customers…not very successfully in 2010.
- Technology and services companies will further enable authors for self-publishing and in their sales goals. At least one big name author will experiment in self-publishing in 2010.
- eCatalogs will become a standard tool in selling content to booksellers, librarians, etc..
- Digital galleys will gain in popularity.
- E-content will be grafted into print in innovative ways.
- New ebook data reports and ebook directories will become ‘must-have’ resources. Gilbane Group has a series of three publishing transformation reports planned in 2010.
Follow me on Twitter @ ePubDr
The growth in web-centric communication has created a major focus on content management, web content management , component content management, and so on. This interest is driven primarily by increasing demand for rich, interactive, accessible information products delivered via the Web. The focus is not misplaced but may be missing part of the point. To be specific, in our focus on the “management” part of CM, we may be missing the first word in the phrase…. “Content.”
It’s true that the application of increasing amounts of computer and brain power to the processes associated with preparing and delivering the kind of information demanded by today’s users can improve those products. But it does so within limits set by and at costs generated by the content “raw material” it gets from the content providers. In many cases, the content available to web product development processes is so structurally crude that it requries major clean-up and enhancement in order to adequately participate in the classification and delivery process. As the focus on elegant Web delivery increases, barring real changes in the condition of this raw content, the cost of enhancement is likely to grow proportionally, straining the involved organizations’ ability to support it.
The answer may be in an increased focus on the processes and tools used to create the original content. We know that the original creator of most content knows the most about how it should be logically structured and most about the best way to classify it for search and retrieval. Trouble is, in most cases, we provide no means of capturing what the creator knows about his or her intellectual product. Moreover, because many creators have never been able to fully populate the metadata needed to classify and deliver their content, in past eras, professional catalogers were employed to complete this final step. In today’s world, however, we have virtually eliminated the cataloger, assuming instead that the prodigious computer power available to us could develop the needed classification and structure from the content itself. That approach can and does work, but it will require better raw material if it is to achieve the level of effectiveness needed to keep the Web from becoming a virtual haystack in which finding the needle is more good luck than good measure. Native XML editors instead of today’s visually oriented word processors, spreadsheets, graphics and other media forms with content-specific XML under them, increased use of native XML databases and a host of rich content-centric resources are part of this content evolution.
Most important, however, may be promulgation of the realization across society that creating content includes more than just making it look good on the screen, and that the creator shares in that responsibility. This won’t be an easy or quick process, requiring more likely generations than years, but if we don’t begin soon, we may end up with a Web 3 or 4 or 5.0 trying to deliver content that isn’t even yet 1.0.
CSOFT International Ltd., a provider of multilingual localization, testing, and outsourced software development for the global market, announced the upcoming launch of TermWiki, a multilingual, collaborative and Wiki-based terminology management system for the the localization industry. TermWiki comes with enhanced Google-like fuzzy match search capabilities, automated notification features, detailed accessibility and user profile management, a structured dispute resolution infrastructure, image and video support, as well as customizable forms embedded in the system to facilitate compliance with relevant ISO standards for the presentation of terminological data categories. TermWiki is scheduled for public release this spring. http://www.csoftintl.com
As the world of search becomes more and more sophisticated (and that process has been underway for decades,) we may be approaching the limits of software’s ability to improve its ability to find what a searcher wants. If that is true, and I suspect that it is, we will finally be forced to follow the trail of crumbs up the content life cycle… to its source.
Indeed, most of the challenges inherent in today’s search strategy and products appears to grow from the fact that while we continually increase our demands for intelligence on the back end, we have done little if anything to address the chaos that exists on the front end. You name it, different word processing formats, spreadsheets, HTML tagged text, database delimited files, and so on are all dumped into what we think of as a coherent, easily searchable body of intellectual property. It isn’t and isn’t likely to become so any time soon unless we address the source.
Having spent some time in the library automation world, I can remember the sometimes bitter controversies over having just two major foundations for cataloging source material (Dewey and LC; add a third if you include the NICEM A/V scheme.) Had we known back then that the process of finding intellectual property would devolve into the chaos we now confront, with every search engine and database product essentialy rolling its own approach to rational search, we would have considered ourselves blessed. In the end, it seems, we must begin to see the source material, its physcial formats, its logical organization and its inclusion of rational cataloging and taxonomy elements as the conceptual raw material for its own location.
As long as the word processing world teaches that anyone creating anything can make it look like it should in a dozen different ways, ignoring any semblance of finding-aid inclusion, we probably won’t have a truly workable ability to find what we want without reworking the content or wading through a haystack of misses to find our desired hits.
Unfortunately, the solutions of yesteryear, including after-creation cataloging by a professional cataloger, probably won’t work now either, for cost if no other reason. We will be forced to approach the creators of valuable content, asking them for a minimum of preparation for searching their product, and providing the necessary software tools to make that possible.
We can’t act too soon because, despite the growth of software elegance and raw computer power, this situation will likely get worse as the sheer volume of valuable content grows. Regards, Barry Read more: Enterprise Search Practice Blog: https://gilbane.com/search_blog/
